Maybe “travelling as a hobby” as a women’s preference with regards to men is at about it being a man’s openness and ability to deal with totally different environments, disposable income, time availability and possibly foreign language skills.

Yeah, but they’re great at discharging the righteous indignation of people who might otherwise do something extreme like going on demonstrations or start campaigning for non-“moderate” political parties.

This way people just put their personal data next to a meaningless and powerless piece of text on a website alongside that of other people, get the feeling of release after having done something about what pisses them of, and won’t do anything further about it.

Petitions are the single greatest invention of the Internet Age to keep the masses dormant (Social Media would’ve been it if, it wasn’t that, as the far-right has shown, it can be used to turn some people into activists).

Well, that’s the second part of my theory but I didn’t went into it to avoid muddling the point I was making:

• I think the “neutral” majority shift more to one side or the other depending on who dominates society and the main sources of culture and information in it.

So in present “Greed is good” (very much a Sociopath slogan) times with mainstream media and a large section of the Culture production and distribution (in the form of TV, but also TV Show and Movie making) in the hands of extremelly wealthy people and when those we are told we should look up to are people like Musk (well, him specifically maybe not anymore) and Bezos, the “neutral” majority has shifted significantly towards the asshole side of things.

The World would be a lot different if our “heroes” were Scientists and Environmentalists.

Years ago I concluded (wrongly or rightly) that most people are neutral, a small handfull are actually good people (willing to sacrifice their personal benefit for people they don’t know with no expectation of gaining from it, even in the form of social approval) and a small handful are assholes, but the assholes do such a disproportionate amount of damage that they end up having a massive impact on everybody else.

The stuff in computer games that makes NPCs move around the game world from point A to point B has been called AI for ages (and in this case specifically, is generally the A* pathing algorithm which isn’t even all that complex).

It’s only recently that marketing-types, salesmen and journalists with no actual technical expertise have started pushing AI as if the I in the acronym actually meant general intelligence rather than the “intelligence-alike” meaning that it has had for decades.

Salesmanship is the essence of management at those levels.

Which brings us back around to the original subject of this thread - tech bros - in my own experienced in Tech recently and back in the 90s boom, this generation of founders and “influencers” aren’t techies, they’re people from areas heavy on salesmanship, not actually on creating complex things that objectivelly work.

The complete total dominance of sales types in both domains id why LLMs are being pushed the way they are as if they’re some kind of emerging-AGI and lots of corporates believe it and are trying to hammer those square pegs into round holes even though the most basic of technical analises would tell them that it doesn’t work like that.

Ultimately since the current societal structures we have massively benefit that kind or personality, we’re going to keep on having these kinds of barely-useful-stuff-insanely-hyped-up cycles wasting tons of resources because salesmanship is hardly a synonym for efficiency or wisdom.

There are only two types of “Super High-IQ” people who will go for an unpaid job working in politics for the likes of Musk:

• Very naive young things, hence very inexperienced and who are going to do all mistakes in the book and then some for the next couple of years as they learn the ropes. By the time they know enough about the job they’ll be burned out from working for a guy like Musk not to mention knowing enough to know they’re better of elsewhere.
• Grifters looking for making maximum money from being in politics. Since they’re not getting paid, that means corruption, lots and lots of corruption.

Also, even amongst the “very naive young things”, in my own personal experience, the high intelligent types with the personality to be real believers of far right stuff, are at most above average intelligence but below genius level IQ (which is 120) and hence not really “super high”-IQ (which would more 160+) - I once worked with a guy like that who thought himself very intelligent and in his new job ended up working in an office with two genious level colleagues and he was very entertaining because of his “buttons” were so obvious and he was so easy to give the run around.

Super-high IQ people are often the very opposite of street smart, but one thing they aren’t is stupid and at most fall into the first part of the saying “you can deceive most people some of the time, or some people all of the time, but you can’t deceive most people all of the time” - they can be swindled but they’ll figure it out faster than most.

They’re running around looking for the thiefs.

Soon Twitter will complete its transition to Nazi Bar of Social Media.

Well, the US turning into a banana republic will at least solve the problem for bananas.

And for those on the other side of the Atlantic, there are several computer shops that will just put a computed together for you without an OS.

Here’s a random example “configure your own computer” from a computer shop in France. In this one the OS (Système d’exploitation) is not included and you have to pay extra for it.

In my experience with custom assemblies like this the OS is never included.

When I live in the UK at some point I’ve even used of these kind of stores there to get a custom notebook.

It’s basically an “assemble your own computer” for people who don’t know how to do it and aren’t confident enough to try (understandable given that the parts value of a whole desktop PC adds up to at least €1000 so there generally is some fear of fucking it up if you’ve never done it before).

Sometimes a point is well made even if I disagree with it, the conclusion in it or disagree with the path it suggests whilst agreeing with the objectives.

It’s like how in Politics in better times (or less adversarial countries) one might respect a political oponent whilst disagreeing with them.

There’s also a trait in some cultures were people tend to try and poke holes on other people’s ideas and point out the bits they find incorrect, not because they’re against it, in disagreement with it or to put down that other person, but to try and help improve that idea even further - in other words, genuine constructive criticism. A downvote isn’t constructive, and sometimes people deserve an upvote for trying or for how far they got, even if the end result could be better.

Maybe they’re premium ads because the advertisers pay extra for access to a pool of self-selected suckers.

I think you’re seriously overestimating the technical prowess of the average law enforcement officer…

Except the price, which is much lower for the SBC, way much lower if one uses one of the lower end Orange Pi or Banana Pi SBCs.

Also you can put Linux on the SBCs (which always come unlocked) hence do way more with them as servers than if one has to use Android as the OS.

I mean, I can get it if people with the technical chops, love for technical challenges and an old and pretty much worthless Android phone, configure it as a server if only because “why not?!”, but it’s not exactly a great option considering that a 40 bucks SBC can do the same, only better, more easily and with far more possibilities (given that it will be running Linux rather than Android).

PS: Actually somebody below mention mobile network connection, which, thinking about it, would be a good reason to use an old Android phone as a server since it has built-in support for 3G (unless it’s quite old) whilst the SBC needs it add to it which might be a problem for the cheaper SBCs (just wondering about how I would get around to do it, I think you need to connect a USB dongle to it and it has to be something compatible with Armbian Linux)

I’m truly, totally, completely shocked … that Windows is still being used on the server side.

The only “The Onion” rather than “Not The Onion” part of this is the idea that they would announce it.

There are gamers and there are gamers.

Some gamers prefer not to have the level of noise of a jet engine taking off right next to them to get a couple percent more frames per second on a game.

I would say there are at least two quite different markets amongst PC gamers who have different preferred balances between performance and the downsides of it (noise, heat, power costs), a bit like not all people who enjoy driving want muscle cars.

Lying and misportraying themselves in social media is nothing for a country were most people are fine with murdering tens of thousands of children because of their ethnicity.

This is nothing given the depths of their depravity.

Ah, the good old fallacy of justifying one thing with something completely unrelated.

One can just as easily use the same argumentative structure to claim that a delayed train on the subway is the tip of the iceberg which is the Worldwide Illuminati Conspiracy or that the wood in one’s wardrobe having a darker spot indicates it used to be a gateway to Narnia.